On the attack in Sagamihara, Japan, today (x-posted from Tumblr)

[capri0mni]

News article from the BBC (26 July, 2016 ~05:00, UCT) -- TRIGGER WARNINGS abound.

From what little I’ve seen (the largest mass killing in Japan since World War II, and I’ve seen a total of three print news stories about it), this is getting spun as yet another “lone killer with mental illness” story. ...

Yeah.

I am highly skeptical of any claim that all acts of hate must be “crazy” just because they are extreme. In fact, I think that assumption is exploited by bigots, who deliberately perform the expected symptoms of mental illness leading up to their (very rational, carefully planned) attacks, so that they can literally get away with murder.

But:

Even if that were true in this case: The shape of an individual’s mental illness is strongly influenced by the dominant schema of the culture they’re living in.

Four hundred years ago, the fears people were obsessed with were witches, demons, and “fairies.”

Today, it’s germs, extraterrestrials, immigrants, women, people of color, and the disabled.

No way, no how, should anyone foist the responsibility for these horrors onto isolated loners, whose ‘crazy’ beliefs just pop, fully formed, into their minds.

It’s time to stop asking: “How can we fix those people?”
We need to ask: “What’s wrong with us? How can we change for the better?”

Comments

[spiralsheep]

Individual "carers" mass murdering disabled, incapacitated, and/or elderly people has been a thing that sometimes happens for as long as I can remember and, yes, I think it is an extension of cultural memes about involuntary "euthanasia" for people whose lives are deemed to be worth-less/worthless by mainstream opinion.

Clue: if it's involuntary then it's not "euthanasia".

Clue: there are many good reasons why most cultures have deeply embedded memes against suicide aka "voluntary euthanasia".

I'm not against all suicide, or living wills in which people preemptively decide to choose not to be resuscitated in extreme circumstances, but many of the examples I'm seeing used as arguments in favour of "voluntary euthanasia" look to me more like people who need better care and/or treatment before they make any life-changing decisions.

All the trigger warnings continue.

[redsixwing]

Coverage that doesn't use the "mentally ill lone wolf" story. Instead, they point the finger at his beliefs - again without inquiring where those came from, but at least the focus is on his ideas about what a perfect world would look like.*

This is intended not as an attempt to disprove your point, but as an example of a start of a better way to handle this.

*A perfect world that requires killing a bunch of people is not a perfect world.

[alatefeline]

>> The shape of an individual’s mental illness is strongly influenced by the dominant schema of the culture they’re living in. <<

>> No way, no how, should anyone foist the responsibility for these horrors onto isolated loners, whose ‘crazy’ beliefs just pop, fully formed, into their minds. <<

Well said.

>> We need to ask: “What’s wrong with us? How can we change for the better?” <<

As a collective us, yes, I agree. Which means each one person has individual responsibility for looking at oneself, and shares group responsibility for the communities in which each person lives/participates. (Bad sentence structure is bad, sorry, not sure how to clarify.)

[davidgillon]

Equally disturbing, how quickly it has fallen out of the headlines. For any other minority group I would have expected to still be second lead last night (less than 24 hours later), after the murder in France, instead it had dropped not just below the fold, but almost entirely off the page.

[untonuggan]

A good article to counter the others:

Throw Away the Masters' Tools: Liberating Ourselves from the Pathology Paradigm